Monthly Roundup – November

Finally! That took a lot longer than I was expecting but full blown progress has been made. If you’re here looking for the facts and figures then you could say that I earned $260 from 40,000 poker hands plus a sizeable amount of starcoins which I can trade in for another $100 if I so wish. But doing so would be missing the entire point of what progress really means.

The money is obviously a nice boost to my bankroll and puts me extremely close to a self promotion, but purely focusing on monetary gains is to ignore everything that has led me to this positive month. It’s like looking at a mans six pack and just seeing his rock hard abs, you fail to notice all the hard work and sacrifices that have been put in place in order for him to get to that stage.

And this month had plenty of hard work and sacrifices

Onwards and Upwards

Ever since my Food Cycle conference I realised that if I really wanted to achieve my goals in life then I couldn’t approach them with my standard blase attitude. Hard work is the number one reason why people in their fields make it to the top, and hard work was something that I was lacking. I could have kept telling myself that it’s fine that my progress was going slowly as long as I kept ‘plugging away’ or that it was fine to stay up until 2am because ‘I’m self employed’ but the cold hard facts was that everything I was doing before the conference was wrong.

This month everything changed.

My sleeping patterns, my priorities, my goals, my social life, my attitude, even my gym has changed. And I have reaped the rewards that my new self has given me;

I feel fresh and focused the majority of the time.

I enjoy my leisure activities more because I feel like I’ve earned them

I feel happy and content in knowing that what I’m doing is best for my long term success

I can’t repeat this enough but success, mastery or even moderate adequacy does not happen overnight in anything. Whether that’s in poker, learning languages, writing, healthy eating, sports or bloody knitting. Everything takes time. But what I failed to realise for the vast majority of the year is that you can’t have your cake, and eat it.

If you really want that goal then you’re sure as hell going to have to work for it. And if you’re sure as hell that you are going to work for it then YOU SURE AS HELL can’t stay up until god knows what time doing god knows what.

It doesn’t work like that.

The greatest thing is that I don’t feel like a hermit stuck in a cage, in fact I feel quite the opposite. You might be picturing me ‘working hard’ by spending days upon days stuck in front of my computer barely eating whilst a thousand hands of poker dash by me. You could be picturing me bogged down in a 100 poker mathematics books all spread out over my bed in one mountain of algebraic gobbledegook. Or you could see me having sleepless nights as I count EV calculations in my head as they jump lumberly over the fence. But none of this is true. Far from it.

Goal Setting

The simple truth is that I set myself monthly, weekly and daily goals, that are relatively accomplishable and make sure that I do them. Every goal is achievable and every goal is made so it brings me closer to my long term outcomes, no matter how big or small. Some days I have other stuff to do and so I make my goals smaller, other days I feel fresh and lively so I make those goals larger. It’s all in a very active state of flux and will certainly change and evolve over time. But that’s something we all have, whether we want to admit it or not. Time.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

My Pokerstars Account

I’ve been genuinely ashamed to post up my pokerstars account over the last few months but from here on in I’m bringing it back, warts and all!

(for reference 1000 star coins is $10)

Edit: Jesus Christ it’s Christmas Already!

So I totally forgot that this would be my last Monthly Roundup until the new year! Time has flown by! If you’re still reading this I really would like to thank you for taking time out of your day to follow me along on my silly adventure. I genuinely am really appreciative of anyone that has put up with me over the last year and I promise to improve on many aspects of this site, my results, my writing and myself. Have an absolute blast of a Christmas and just remember…it’s alllllll good! If you’ve got a roof over your head and some food in your stomach then you’re already onto a massive winner! Take care and I’ll see you in the New Year!